Chaos Engineering with Feature Flags: Testing Resilience Through Controlled Failures
Most teams agree that reliability is learned in production, but the real challenge is learning without affecting the customer experience. After all, even well-designed systems fail in subtle ways: a single slow dependency can cascade into bottlenecks, or an overloaded database connection can push response times beyond what users will tolerate. We can wait for incidents to expose these cracks, or simulate them on our own with the help of feature flags.
Chaos engineering with feature flags offers a more controlled alternative. Instead of waiting for failures to happen, teams can deliberately inject small, realistic faults into production, limit their blast radius, and observe how systems behave under stress without risking a full-scale incident.
In this article, we'll look at how feature flags work, how they fit naturally into chaos engineering practices, and how chaos-enabled feature flags can help test production resilience through controlled failures.
